Lost and gone away / Lynn Jenner.

Includes bibliographical references.

One: The ring story -- Two: The panorama machine. A boy called Joseph -- As a child -- 1938 -- Everyday life -- A list of all the books -- Freud -- Walter Benjamin's dream -- The primeval word was a shimmering aura -- Missing people -- Sappho -- Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt -- The crocodile wrapped in words -- Huntley & Palmers biscuit tins -- Mysteries and speculations -- Reconstructions -- Yahrzeit -- The poem about the candle -- The muttering poem -- Tree of codes -- The street of crocodiles -- A warning -- A disease of the eyes -- Now again, grass wave -- Keas call for me -- I'm not sure what to call what I have done -- Six degrees of freedom -- The structure of human activity -- Secondhand sureshots -- Everyone knows -- It's only a dead tree -- L-P 67 -- Drohobych -- We hear the voice of an older man -- The facts -- Lost art -- October 2013 -- Three: Point last seen -- Four: I ring the bell anyway. Thinking about waves -- Rats uncounted -- Looking back from the island -- Hair -- Time is the most artificial of human inventions -- Speaking for those who were silenced -- Steven Schpielberg -- Maps and guides -- Belonging to the tribe -- Everyone needs a handbag -- Anglo-Celtic eyes -- Home -- A tchemodan -- If only it were possible, I would get into the photo -- More awkwardness -- Abe's stories -- This crazy thing in life -- For an hour or two I am a witness for the witness -- Excuse me madam -- The facts -- The hole -- The Holocaust Gallery at the Auckland War Memorial Museum -- A cake and a budgie -- Do come to the City Hotel -- I ring the bell anyway -- How, exactly will that happen? -- Warning -- The setting sun -- A particular kind of conversation -- The wind blows.

"Between 2010 and 2014, award-winning poet Lynn Jenner made several emotional and intellectual investigations. Lost and Gone Away is the literary record of these: a fascinating, four-part hybrid of memoir, essays, prose poems and poetry. Through the book Jenner considers losses both small and enormous - that of an object, a loved one, a world and its literature, entire communities - but perhaps her ultimate subject is the act of searching itself. In the first section's gripping narrative, Jenner tries to locate a small but important object lost in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. The stakes are raised and emotions deepen as the book goes on. In its third section, loved ones are missing, and attention radiates out from that epicentre of loss, the Point Last Seen, from which all searches begin. Finally, quietly, devastatingly, in the fourth section ('I ring the bell anyway') Jenner explores how one might think and write about the Holocaust, from far away. The cumulative result is a fresh, sobering and searching intellectual journey - asking many questions and coming to few conclusions. It is a tremendously powerful work of creative nonfiction"--Publisher information.